Cabinet Committees Dail Éireann — 2025-12-10 ============================================================ Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central It is just an observation. I will start with Deputy Aindrias Moynihan, who made a very good point. Hopefully, with this national development plan and the allocation of ten years, we will avoid this stop-start where we get a project from A to B but C is not provided for at all. We had that over the last two decades, I suppose. I recall how the Cork-Limerick road had planning in an earlier era and then that was all shelved after the financial crash and so on. If they had kept the planning going, they would have been in a much better position now to actually start. I do accept that, and particularly on the N22. The Macroom bypass has been extremely effective but there is the problem that you go along a great road into Ballincollig if you are coming from the Kerry side but then you are suddenly into what, as the Deputy was saying to me the other day, is like a parking lot for the next 20 to 40 minutes. It is a very good point that we should encourage Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, and others to keep thinking of the next stage and to have the planning ready and preparatory work done. I will work on that particular stretch the Deputy has referenced. Deputy Ó Murchú raised the flood damage, CFRAM and the five projects in Louth. Deputy Barry Heneghan had a similar point. In general, flood protection schemes take a long time. Some of that is due to stakeholder engagement and public engagement, and there can be objections and so on. If any projects are of such imperative, these are. We do know that when these projects happen, they are effective in protecting against flooding. Towns that had historical flooding events have stopped them because of good infrastructure being put in. These projects invite a lot of objections. We had it in Cork city and it went the whole way to the top courts. It is only now that work is under way and all of that. There was flooding in Cork city this week. It was there because of the tidal levels, but one could argue that if you had the protections in, then businesses and people would have been protected and people could have gone in and out of town. I am very conscious of that. With regard to Deputy Dolan's question, I will come back to the Minister. It was a good point. I do no know where we are on it in terms of the national development plan but there is no question that Galway city is facing enormous congestion, including all the areas feeding into Galway city. It is a real problem. Public transport, including rail, does give us an option, but not the whole option. We have to get the ring road done. Equally, though, the rail infrastructure is critical. I will talk to the Minister for Transport, Darragh O'Brien, about that. Deputy O'Rourke raised the issue of the updated wind farm guidelines. The Deputy is correct that they have been a long time coming and technology has changed in the intervening period. I have asked the Minister, James Browne, to accelerate the work on the guidelines. The unit in his Department is also working on planning exemptions. There is a lot of work there. The Department is also working on rural guidelines for housing and one-off housing. There is a lot of work in that Department but I accept that we do need to bring this to a conclusion. At some stage, we need some collective debate on energy. We are all dealing with individual cases of objections to solar, objections to gas generation, objections to wind onshore, and objections to wind offshore potentially. We desperately need the offshore wind. This is something we have got to progress through planning. I am hoping we can get wind farms built, certainly through 2030 to 2031. If we do not, then we are in trouble from an energy perspective. As a collective - when I say "collective", I mean the entire Oireachtas - we have to try to stand back and say that there are huge challenges. We discussed security earlier. We are very dependent on the importation of fossil fuels through the interconnectors. There are real issues here that we need to be clear-eyed about. We can then take decisions once everybody realises that there are pluses and minuses in all of this. Deputy Paul Murphy raised BusConnects, which he said was a "disaster"----- --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:27+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-10